PROCESSING

PGI Accelerator compilers

11 May 2010

The Portland Group

The Portland Group has added support for the latest Nvidia GPUs to its entire line of PGI Accelerator compiler products, including the PGI 10.4 release. Nvidia Cuda-enabled GPUs are used to accelerate the performance of appropriate HPC applications.

The latest version of PGI Accelerator compilers provide full support for Cuda Fortran on the latest Nvidia GPU platforms and add support for allocatable device arrays within Fortran modules along with several API enhancements. Cuda Fortran, co-defined by Nvidia and The Portland Group, is an extended version of the Fortran 2003 programming language that gives software developers direct control over all aspects of GPU programming. The PGI 10.4 release also enhances support for the PGI Accelerator directives-based programming model on Fermi platforms. These directives make GPU software development easily approachable by application domain experts. Rather than porting and parallelising entire programs or functions for the GPU, the directives allow incremental porting and parallelisation of individual compute-intensive loops and code segments using standard-compliant and portable Fortran or C.

The PGI 10.4 release adds several features, including the use of PGI Unified Binary technology to build one version of an application that will run on any Cuda-enabled GPU. With PGI 10.4 compilers, programmers can automatically generate code that works and is optimised for both a Tesla C1060 GPU and the new Tesla C2050 GPU. In addition, they can take advantage of new GPU features including faster double-precision arithmetic, larger and configurable fast shared memory, and increased number of cores. Support for new Nvidia GPU platforms in PGI 10.4 extends across Linux, Windows and MacOS, and within Microsoft Visual Studio via PGI Visual Fortran.